Days of Awe

Brother on Sunday

She is on the phone. He can see her reflection in the bathroom mirror, the headset wrapped around her ear as if she were an air-traffic controller or a Secret Service agent. "Are you sure?" she whispers. "I can't believe it. I don't want to believe it. If it's true, it's horrible. . . . Of course I don't know anything! If I knew something, I'd tell you. . . . No, he doesn't know anything either. If he knew, he'd tell me. We vowed we wouldn't keep secrets." She pauses, listening for a moment. "Yes, of course, not a word."

"Tom," she calls. "Tom, are you ready?"

"In a minute," he says.

He examines himself in her makeup mirror. He raises his eyebrows, bares his teeth, smiles. And then he smiles again, harder, showing gum. He tilts his head, left and right, checking where the shadows fall. He turns on the light and flips the mirror to the magnifying side. A thin silver needle enters the reflection; there's a close-up of skin, the glistening tip of the needle, surrounded by a halo of light. He blinks. The needle goes into the skin; his hand is steady on the syringe. He injects a little here, a little there; it's just a touch-up, a filler-up. Later, when someone says, "You look great," he'll smile and his face will bend gently, but no lines will appear. "Doctor's orders," he'll say. He recaps the syringe, tucks it into his shirt pocket, flips the toilet seat up, and pees.

When he comes out of the bathroom, his wife, Sandy, is there, in the bedroom, waiting. "Who was that on the phone?" he asks.

"Sara," she says.

He waits, knowing that silence will prompt her to say more.

"Susie called Sara to say that she's worried Scott is having an affair."

He says, quite honestly, "Of all people, Scott isn't someone I'd think would be having an affair."

"She doesn't know that he's having an affair-she just suspects." Sandy puts her cover-up into a tote bag and hands him his camera. "Can't leave without this," she says.

"Thanks," he says. "Are you ready to go?"

"Check my back," she says. "I felt something." She turns, lifting her blouse.

"You have a tick," he says, plucking it off her.

Somewhere in the summer house, a loud buzzer goes off. "The towels are done," she says. "Should we take wine?" he asks.

"I packed a bottle of champagne and some orange juice. It is Sunday, after all."

"My brother is coming after all," he says. His brother, Roger, visits the beach once a year, like a tropical storm that changes everything.

"It's a beautiful day," she says. And she's right.

Tom sits in a low chair, facing the water, his feet buried in the sand. Just in front of him, hanging from the lifeguard stand, an American flag softly flutters. His sunglasses are his shield, his thick white lotion a kind of futuristic body armor that lets him imagine he is invisible. He believes that on the beach you are allowed to stare, as though you were looking not at the person but through the person, past the person at the water, past the water to the horizon, past the horizon into infinity.

He is seeing things that he would otherwise not allow himself to see. He is staring. He is in awe, mesmerized by the body, by the grace and lack of grace. He takes pictures-"studies," he calls them. It's his habit, his hobby. What is he looking for? What is he thinking while he does this? This is something he asks himself, noting that he often thinks of himself in the third person-a dispassionate observer.

The beach fills up, towels are unrolled, umbrellas unfurl like party decorations, and as the heat builds, bodies are slowly unwrapped. He, of all people, knows what's real and what's not. There are those who have starved the flesh off their bones and those who have had it surgically removed or relocated. Each person wears it differently-the dimpling on the thighs, the love handles, the inevitable sag. He can't help noticing.

Around him his friends talk. He's not listening carefully enough to register exactly who is saying what-just the general impression, the flow. "Did you have the fish last night? I made a fish. We bought a fish. His brother loves to fish. I bought a necklace. We bought a house. I bought another watch. He's thinking of getting a new car. Didn't you just get one last year? I want to renovate. Your house is so beautiful. His wife used to be so beautiful. Do you remember her? Could never forget. Tom went out with her once."

"Just once?"

"He doesn't have the best social skills," his wife says.

Now they are talking about him. He knows he should defend himself. He lowers the camera and turns toward them.

"Why do you always say that?"

"Because it's true," Sandy says.

"It may be, but that's not why I only went out with her once."

"Why didn't you date her again?" she wants to know.

"Because I met you," he says, raising the camera as if inserting a punctuation mark.

The intensity of the sunlight is such that he has to squint in order to see, and at times he can't see at all-there is a blinding abundance of light and reflection. He thinks of a blind girl who lived in his neighborhood when he was growing up: Audra Stevenson. She was smart and very pretty. She wore dark glasses and tapped her way down the sidewalk with her cane, a thick white bulb on the end of it. He used to watch her go down the street and wonder if she wore her glasses at home. He wondered what her eyes looked like. Perhaps they were very sensitive; perhaps she oversaw-that's how he thought of it. Maybe she wasn't blind in the sense of everything's being black but blind in that there was too much light, so that everything was overexposed and turned a milky white with only spots of color punching through-a red shirt, a brown branch, the grayish shadows of people. He asked her out once. He stopped her on the street and introduced himself.

"I know who you are," she said. "You're the boy who watches me go home."

"How do you know that?" he asked.

"I'm blind," she said, "not dumb."

He picked her up at her house, hooked his elbow through hers, and led her to the movie theater. During the film he whispered in her ear, an ongoing narration of the action, until finally she said, "Sh-h-h. I can't hear what they're saying if you keep talking to me."

After the date, Roger, who was two years older, made fun of him for being too shy to ask a "regular girl" out and, no doubt, for going on a date long before Roger himself ever would. No girl was good enough for Roger: eyebrows were too thick, Grace's chin too long, Molly's eyes too wide, Ruthie's laugh too high-pitched. Every girl was just one twist of the genetic helix away from having a syndrome of some sort. Roger mocked "Tom the younger," as he liked to call him, loudly, as Audra was walking away, and Tom was so mortified, so sure that Audra had heard every word, that he never spoke to her again.

Behind him they are still talking. "Arctic char, orata, Chilean sea bass, swordfish, ahi tuna. Mole sauce, ancho chili, a rub, a marinade, a pesto, a ragout, a teriyaki reduction." They love to talk about food and exercise-running, biking, tennis, Pilates, trainers, workouts, cleansing diets. The one thing they don't talk much about anymore is sex; the ones who are having it can't imagine not having it, and the ones who aren't having it remember all too well when they were the ones having it and saying they couldn't imagine not having it. So it has become off-limits. Also not discussed is the fact that some of them are having sex with one another's spouses-i.e., hiding in plain sight.

He is only half listening, thinking about how life changes. If he met these people now, he's not sure he would be their friend, not sure he would have dinner with them every Saturday night, play tennis with them every Sunday, vacation with them twice a year, see the movies they see, eat at the places they eat at, do whatever it is that they all do together just because they're a kind of club-all while worrying about what will happen if he strays, if he does something other than what they expect of him, and he doesn't mean sex, he means something more. He looks at his friends; their wives all wear the same watches, like tribal decorations, symbols of their status. The gold glints in the sun.

He is looking at them as they absently sift sand with their hands and imagining them as children in cotton hats, pouring sand from one bucket to another as their parents talk over and around them. He is thinking of their parents, now either dead or single in their eighties or attended by new "companions" they met in physical therapy or on Elderhostel vacations. He looks at his friends and wonders what they will be like if they make it to eighty. The men seem oblivious to the inevitability of aging, oblivious to the fact that they are no longer thirty, to the fact that they are not superheroes with special powers. He thinks of the night, a year ago, when they were all at a local restaurant and one of them went to grab something from the car. He ran across the road as though he thought he glowed in the dark. But he didn't. The driver of an oncoming car didn't see him. He flew up and over it. And when someone came into the restaurant to call the police, Tom went out, not because he was thinking of his friend but because he was curious, always curious. Once outside, realizing what had happened, he ran to his friend and tried to help, but there was nothing to be done. The next day, driving by the spot, he saw one of his friend's shoes-they had each bought a pair of the same kind the summer before-suspended from a tree.

"What time is Roger coming?" someone asks.

"Not sure," he says.

A friend's wife leans over and shows him a red dot, buried between her breasts. "What do you think this is?"

"Bug bite," he says.

"Not skin cancer?"

"Not cancer," he says.

"Not infected?"

"Bug bite," he says.

"And what about this?" She shows him something else, as though hoping for bonus points. This spot is on what his father jokingly used to call "the tenderloin," her inner thigh.

"Isn't it funny that your father was a butcher and you're in the business of dealing with human meat?" another of the friends asks.

"It's all flesh and blood," he says, pressing the spot with his finger. "Pimple."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes."

"Not skin cancer."

"Does it look infected?"

"If you leave it alone, it'll be fine," he says.

He is forever being asked to step into the spare bedroom, the bathroom, the kitchen, even the walk-in closet, because someone wants to show him something. It's as though they were pulling him aside to make a confession. Mostly the answer is easy. Mostly whatever it is is nothing. But every now and then, he's surprised; they show him something that catches him off guard. "How'd you get that?" he asks.

"You don't want to know," they say.

But of course in the end they tell him more than he wants to know.

"Was your father really a butcher?" the visiting sister of one of the friends asks.

"Yep. And he really talked about women's bodies like they were cuts of meat. 'Boy, she's got good veal cheeks! That girl would make one hell of a rib roast, trussed, bound, and stuffed.' And then he'd laugh in a weird way. My mother thought of herself as an artist. She signed up for a life-drawing class when I was eleven, and she took me with her, because she thought I'd appreciate it. I just sat there, not knowing where to look. Finally, the instructor said, 'Draw with us?' I'd never seen a bare breast before-drawing it was like touching it. I drew that breast again and again. And then I glanced at my mother's easel and saw that she'd drawn everything but the woman. She'd drawn the table with the vase, the flowers, the window in the background, the drapes, but not the model. The instructor asked her, 'Where's the girl?' 'I prefer a still life,' my mother said. 'But my son, on the other hand, look how beautiful he thinks she is!'"

"Was she being mean?"

He shrugs.

"She shouldn't have taken you to the class," Sandy says. "She was teasing you."

"I thought maybe I'd take Roger out on the boat this afternoon," one of the friends says. "Sound like fun?"

"Only if you capsize," he says cryptically. The friend laughs, knowing that he isn't kidding.

Ahead of him on the beach, a boy is spreading lotion on an older woman. He imagines the viscous feel of lotion warm from the sun, gliding over her skin-friction. He imagines the boy painting the woman with lotion and then using his fingernail to write his initials on her back. He thinks of a time in St. Barts, when Sandy was lying nude on the beach while he painted, and he picked up his brush and began making swirls on her skin. He painted her body, and then he photographed her walking away from him into the water. In the sea the paint ran down her skin in beautiful color. Later, one of the friends, the one with the boat, confessed, ÒI got hard just watching.Ó

"You should try it sometime," he said. "With your wife."

"Oh, we did, that night, but I didn't have any paint. All I could find was a ballpoint pen. It wasn't the same."

"Drink?" Sandy asks, snapping him back into the moment.

"Sure," he says. She pours a combination of orange juice and champagne into a plastic cup and leans toward him. He can smell her, her perfume, the salty beach. As he takes the drink, it splashes up out of the cup and onto his arm. He licks it, his tongue tickled by the carbonation, the flavor of citrus, of wine, mixed with salt and sweat. He thinks that it's strange he can't remember ever having tasted himself before. His tongue rakes the fur on his forearm and picks up a tinge of blood from a scrape this morning. The flavor is good, full of life.